I walked into The Losers this weekend understanding that what I was about to sit through would be several billion degrees shy of high art. I knew it would be trash, and I was (mostly) fine with that, ‘cause it would be fun trash – a nice little warm-up for the sugary, teeth-decaying blockbuster junk food in the summer months to come. But does entering a theater to see a sloppy, low-brow flick automatically mean you have to sit through 15 minutes of equally bad (or worse) trash-heap trailers? You could argue that, in such a scenario, one brings this suffering upon themselves. Or you could argue that the majority of the trailers crawling out of dingy Hollywood editing caves these days tend to be pretty terrible, and setting yourself up for B-movie meal only increases your odds of enduring putrefied appetizers.
Terrible Trailers. We’ve all seen them and grumbled about them. They show the funniest parts. They ruin the “gee whiz” action moments. They give away the twists. They give away the whole goddamn plot. And for some reason, we accept their malfeasances. We shrug, say “that sucks”, and move on.
Well I’m not moving on. I’m just not reasonable/mature enough. And with that in mind, I present you the first in the Cinewise Terrible Trailers series…
SPLICE (2010) (click the link if the embedded trailer doesn't work for you)
Some questions you might ask yourself after watching the trailer for Splice – What the hell wass Sarah Polly thinking? How the hell did Adrien Brody ever win an Oscar? Oh, and WHY THE HELL DID THEY BASICALLY SHOW THAT WHOLE F*CKING SCENE?
Remember that awesome trailer for The Devil Wears Prada, where they basically just played the Meryl Streep intro scene all the way through? That trailer worked us up and got us excited by raising questions (who the hell is this Miranda? How will Anne Hathaway’s country bumpkin handle her? Etc.). It introduced the character in a cool and powerful way, gave us the lay of the land of the story, and piqued our interest.
Splice does the opposite. It presents us with a creepy “will the character survive or will the monster get her” scene, and then ANSWERS THE QUESTION. In the trailer. You know how effective that scene’s gonna be in the movie now? Think it will be tense? Think it will be scary? Or do you think its power to be either of those things is taken away by the fact that we already know the outcome?
The Splice trailer answers other questions as well – what the monster will look like, how the entire first act plays out – so instead we ask questions like the ones above, or wonder why this looks so much like a CBS Films product.
There’s one more question the Splice trailer answers for me.
And the answer is “no”.
2 comments:
YES, i have never agreed with anything more. SO many reasons to hate that trailer and you have outlined them all. I laughed out loud during the trailer and I'm not really a laugh out loud in the theater kind of gal. Joke of a trailer for a joke of a movie.
I think the movie will be definitely worth a watch. Sarah Polley has great taste for one, but you know, you can't slate a movie based on the marketers decision to make a shitty trailer. That's understandable, but unfair.
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